Saved by Gravity: Henry Miller in Greece

I have been reading more books by Henry Miller. Nothing shook me like his Tropic of Cancer. But the one I finished most recently -- The Colossus of Maroussi -- is about the five months he spent traveling in Greece in 1939. It resonated with me because he was transformed by the geography, history and humanity of Greece and its people the same way I have been deeply affected in Cusco, Peru. It tells you how much surroundings affect you; how one place can produce distress and another inner peace by your mere presence. Miller contrasts his fear of living like a machine in America with the beauty, simplicity and humanity of living with next to nothing in Greece. "The light of Greece opened my eyes, penetrated my pores, expanded my whole being," he writes. I could say the exact same thing about Cusco. Who knew salvation could come not from gods, prophets, intellectuals, leaders, lovers, possessions or ideas but from the intoxicating gravity of a geographical location?

Excerpts

I found in him an expression of the American spirit at its worst. Progress was their obsession. More machines, more efficiency, more capital, more comforts—that was their whole talk. I asked them if they had heard of the millions who were unemployed in America. They ignored the question. I asked them if they realized how empty, restless and miserable the American people were with all their machine-made luxuries and comforts. They were impervious to my sarcasm. What they wanted was success—money, power, a place in the sun.

***

When would life begin? I wanted to know. When they had all the things which America had, or Germany, or France. Life was made up of things, of machines mainly, from what I could gather. Life without money was an impossibility: one had to have clothes, a good home, a radio, a car, a tennis racquet, and so on. I told them I had none of those things and that I was happy without them, that I had turned my back on America precisely because these things meant nothing to me.

***

At that moment I rejoiced that I was free of possessions, free of all ties, free of fear and envy and malice. I could have passed quietly from one dream to another, owning nothing, regretting nothing, wishing nothing.

***

War has another bad effect—it makes young people feel guilty and conscience-stricken. In Corfu I had been studying the antics of a superbly healthy young Englishman, a lad of twenty or so, who had intended to be a Greek scholar. He was running around like a chicken with its head off begging someone to put him in the front line where he could have himself blown to smithereens.

***

He saw the humorous aspect of everything, which is the real test of the tragic sense.

***

He could galvanize the dead with his talk. It was a sort of devouring process: when he described a place he ate into it, like a goat attacking a carpet.

***

To keep the mind empty is a feat, a very healthful feat too. To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.

***

When you’re right with yourself it doesn’t matter what flag is flying over your head or who owns what or whether you speak English or Monongahela. The absence of newspapers, the absence of news about what men are doing in different parts of the world to make life more livable or unlivable is the greatest single boon. If we could just eliminate newspapers a great advance would be made, I am sure of it. Newspapers engender lies, hatred, greed, envy, suspicion, fear, malice. We don’t need the truth as it is dished up to us in the daily papers. We need peace and solitude and idleness.

***

... there is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.

***

When the Greek leaves a place he leaves a hole. The American leaves behind him a litter of junk—shoe laces, collar buttons, razor blades, petroleum tins, vaseline jars and so on.

***

I have seen Greeks walking about in the most ludicrous and abominable garb imaginable—straw hat from the year 1900, billiard cloth vest with pearl buttons, discarded British ulster, pale dungarees, busted umbrella, hair shirt, bare feet, hair matted and twisted—a makeup which even a Kaffir would disdain, and yet, I say it sincerely and deliberately, I would a thousand times rather be that poor Greek than an American millionaire.

***

To sail slowly through the streets of Poros is to recapture the joy of passing through the neck of the womb. It is a joy too deep almost to be remembered.

***

There is every reason to be sad at this moment: all the premonitions which I have had for ten years are coming true. This is one of the lowest moments in the history of the human race. There is no sign of hope on the horizon. The whole world is involved in slaughter and bloodshed. I repeat—I am not sad. Let the world have its bath of blood—I will cling to Poros.

***

May they come, may they disembark, may they stay and rest awhile in peace. And on a glad day let them push on, let them cross the narrow strait, on, on, a few more miles—to Epidaurus, the very seat of tranquillity, the world center of the healing art

***

It is the morning of the first day of the great peace, the peace of the heart, which comes with surrender.

***

The peace which most of us know is merely a cessation of hostilities, a truce, an interregnum, a lull, a respite, which is negative. The peace of the heart is positive and invincible, demanding no conditions, requiring no protection. It just is. If it is a victory it is a peculiar one because it is based entirely on surrender, a voluntary surrender, to be sure.

***

We are making constant progress, but it is a progress which leads to the operating table, to the poor house, to the insane asylum, to the trenches.

***

Defeating our neighbor doesn’t give peace any more than curing cancer brings health. Man doesn’t begin to live through triumphing over his enemy nor does he begin to acquire health through endless cures. The joy of life comes through peace, which is not static but dynamic. No man can really say that he knows what joy is until he has experienced peace.

Whatever we cling to, even if it be hope or faith, can be the disease which carries us off. Surrender is absolute: if you cling to even the tiniest crumb you nourish the germ which will devour you.

***

There will be no peace until murder is eliminated from the heart and mind.

***

The wise man has no need to journey forth; it is the fool who seeks the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end. But the two are always fated to meet and unite. They meet at the heart of the world, which is the beginning and the end of the path.

***

Voyages are accomplished inwardly, and the most hazardous ones, needless to say, are made without moving from the spot.

***

As I was basking on the steps of the amphitheatre the very natural thought came to my head to send a word of cheer to my friends. I thought particularly of my psychoanalyst friends. I wrote out three cards, one to France, one to England, and one to America. I very gently urged these broken-down hacks who called themselves healers to abandon their work and come to Epidaurus for a cure. All three of them were in dire need of the healing art—saviours who were helpless to save themselves.

***

The enemy of man is not germs, but man himself, his pride, his prejudices, his stupidity, his arrogance. No class is immune, no system holds a panacea.

***

It is not enough to overthrow governments, masters, tyrants: one must overthrow his own preconceived ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust. We must abandon the hard-fought trenches we have dug ourselves into and come out into the open, surrender our arms, our possessions, our rights as individuals, classes, nations, peoples.

***

An eternity would not suffice to vanquish the demons who torture us. Who put the demons there? That is for each one to ask himself. Let every man search his own heart. Neither God nor the Devil is responsible, and certainly not such puny monsters as Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, et alia. Certainly not such bugaboos as Catholicism, Capitalism, Communism. Who put the demons there in our heart to torture us? A good question, and if the only way to find out is to go to Epidaurus, then I urge you one and all to drop everything and go there—at once.

***

With malice and spite the world may buckle and crack but here, no matter into what vast hurricane we may whip our evil passions, lies an area of peace and calm, the pure distilled heritage of a past which is not altogether lost.

***

What could a little boy be crying about at such an hour in such a wondrous world? Katsimbalis went over and spoke to him. He was crying because his sister had stolen his money. How much money? Three drachmas. Money, money…. Even here there was such a thing as money. The word money never sounded so preposterous to me before. How could one think such a word in this world of terror and beauty and magic? If he had lost a donkey or a parrot I could have understood. But three drachmas—I just couldn’t visualize the meaning of three drachmas. I couldn’t believe he was weeping. It was an hallucination. Let him stand there and weep—the spirit would come and fetch him again; he didn’t belong, he was an anomaly.

***

The shepherd is eternal, an earth-bound spirit, a renunciator.

***

Shepherds are crazy folk. So am I. I am done with civilization and its spawn of cultured souls. I gave myself up when I entered the tomb. From now on I am a nomad, a spiritual nobody. Take your fabricated world and put it away in the museums, I don’t want it, can’t use it.

***

No matter whether we are friends or enemies, no matter whether we call ourselves Jap, Turk, Russian, French, English, German or American, wherever we go, wherever we cast our shadow, wherever we breathe, we poison and destroy. Hooray! shouted the Greek. I too yell Hooray! Hooray for civilization! Hooray! We will kill you all, everybody, everywhere. Hooray for Death! Hooray! Hooray!

***

“And what is it about Greece that makes you like it so much?” asked someone. I smiled. “The light and the poverty,” I said. “You’re a romantic,” said the man. “Yes,” I said, “I’m crazy enough to believe that the happiest man on earth is the man with the fewest needs. And I also believe that if you have light, such as you have here, all ugliness is obliterated. Since I’ve come to your country I know that light is holy: Greece is a holy land to me.”

***

I do faithfully demit, abdicate, abrogate, evaginate and fornicate all powers, signatories, seals and offices in favor of peace and joy, dust and heat, sea and sky, God and angel, having to the best of my ability performed the duties of dealer, slayer, blighter, bludgeoner and betrayer of the Soiled & Civilized Sewing Machine manufactured by Murder, Death & Blight, Inc. of the Dominions of Canada, Australia, Newfoundland, Patagonia, Yucatan, Schleswig-Holstein, Pomerania and other allied, subjugated provinces registered under the Death and Destruction Act of the planet Earth during the whilomst hegemony of the Homo sapiens family this last twenty-five thousand years.

***

Since the wheel fell apart, before that too no doubt, every foot of the land has been fought over, conquered and reconquered, sold, bartered, pawned, auctioned off, levelled with fire and sword, sacked, plundered, administered over by tyrants and demons, converted by fanatics and zealots, betrayed, ransomed, traduced by the great powers of our day, desolated by civilized and savage hordes alike, desecrated by all and sundry, hounded to death like a wounded animal, reduced to terror and idiocy, left gasping with rage and impotence, shunned by all like a leper and left to expire in its own dung and ashes. Such is the cradle of our civilization.

***

There was a sun flooded with lemon and orange which hung ominously over the sultry land in that splashing, dripping radiance which intoxicated Van Gogh. We passed imperceptibly from the quick badlands to a fertile rolling region studded with fields of bright-colored crops; it reminded me of that serene steady smile which our own South gives as you roll through the State of Virginia. It set me dreaming, dreaming of the gentleness and docility of the earth when man caresses it with loving hands.

***

The rain has stopped, the clouds have broken; the vault of blue spreads out like a fan, the blue decomposing into that ultimate violet light which makes everything Greek seem holy, natural and familiar.

***

I put the shoe box under my arm and slowly, meditatively, reverently began the pilgrimage. It was one of the few times in my life that I was fully aware of being on the brink of a great experience. And not only aware but grateful, grateful for being alive, grateful for having eyes, for being sound in wind and limb, for having rolled in the gutter, for having gone hungry, for having been humiliated, for having done everything that I did do since at last it had culminated in this moment of bliss.

***

Left to his own resources man always begins again in the Greek way—a few goats or sheep, a rude hut, a patch of crops, a clump of olive trees, a running stream, a flute.

***

... the moment one returns to the Western world, whether in Europe or America, this feeling of body, of eternality, of incarnated spirit is shattered. We move in clock time amidst the debris of vanished worlds, inventing the instruments of our own destruction, oblivious of fate or destiny, knowing never a moment of peace, possessing not an ounce of faith, a prey to the blackest superstitions, functioning neither in the body nor in the spirit, active not as individuals but as microbes in the organism of the diseased.

***

t is not until I look about me and realize that the vast majority of my fellow men are desperately trying to hold on to what they possess or to increase their possessions that I begin to understand that the wisdom of giving is not so simple as it seems.

***

It was the first voyage I had ever made which was wholly satisfactory, in which there was no slightest trace of disillusionment, in which I was offered more than I had expected to find. The last nights in the Zapion, alone, filled with wonderful memories, were like a beautiful Gethsemane. Soon all this would be gone and I would be walking once more the streets of my own city. The prospect no longer filled me with dread. Greece had done something for me which New York, nay, even America itself, could never destroy. Greece had made me free and whole. I felt ready to meet the dragon and to slay him, for in my heart I had already slain him.

***

We are building an abstract, dehumanized world out of the ashes of an illusory materialism.

***

People seem astounded and enthralled when I speak of the effect which this visit to Greece produced upon me. They say they envy me and that they wish they could one day go there themselves. Why don’t they? Because nobody can enjoy the experience he desires until he is ready for it. People seldom mean what they say. Anyone who says he is burning to do something other than he is doing or to be somewhere else than he is is lying to himself. To desire is not merely to wish. To desire is to become that which one essentially is.

***

The light of Greece opened my eyes, penetrated my pores, expanded my whole being. I came home to the world, having found the true center and the real meaning of revolution. No warring conflicts between the nations of the earth can disturb this equilibrium. Greece herself may become embroiled, as we ourselves are now becoming embroiled, but I refuse categorically to become anything less than the citizen of the world which I silently declared myself to be when I stood in Agamemnon’s tomb. From that day forth my life was dedicated to the recovery of the divinity of man. Peace to all men, I say, and life more abundant!

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